I don’t miss a beat. “The one without you in it?”
“Without you either, by the looks of it,” Xander says. “Will your little shadow twister kill you too? You don’t even know your limits. Or was that first incompetence planned?”
I scoff. “You know nothing.”
“I know your shadow vortex needs a counter-power of equivalent force to reverse it.”
So they’d figured it out. I try not to show my surprise, baring my fangs at him instead. “And you figure that you’ll be the one to do it?”
“How would a person even do this?” Lyle asks. “An exchange of power.”
Xander catches my eye. “I asked…someone about that. There would need to be an outward push of my power. All of it. At once.”
“All of it?” Lyle says aghast. That would?—”
“Kill me, yes,” Xander says. The black mark on his neck seems to suck in the light from all around it.
I tilt my head back and laugh.
Chapter 107
Xander
Exit Music (for a Film) - Radiohead
Iknow what this mark means. It’s not because Aurelia forgave me. It’s not because I’m worthy. In the battle with my father, I had a realisation.
I am not redeemed.
And I canneverbe redeemed. No act, no gesture, can ever undo or make up for what I did to Aurelia and what I had been a part of.
Except perhaps, for one act.
That’s what this black mark is. I’ve been marked for death from the beginning. There has only ever been one path for me.
My kind would live on through King Ashzale on Boneweaver Island. I made sure of that. The Darkcleaver line will not die with me. I rip out my headphones.
“For Lia,” I whisper as the red haze takes over me and I beat my wings towards that black spiral. The last word I want to utter on this earth is her name. My last piece of music. “I vow to love you better in the next life, Aurelia. And in this one, I need to give you mine.”
I roar into the shadows. Into the death that awaits to tear my power apart.
Until from right behind me, there comes an answering roar.
Chapter 108
Scythe
As my regina screams into the shadow vortex, her mighty, scaled body taking her into the dark night, I tremble with fury.
I pat Lyle’s side.“You know what we need to do to stop this.”
My lion-brother stares across the field to the guarded truck where Mace Naga sits, now unprotected by his serpent blood magic.“Just one way, brother.”
Sabrina, Beak, and the assassin twins carved a path for us, and we’re not going to let their deaths go in vain. Lyle slingshots us towards Mace’s truck.
Chapter 109
Aurelia
